Nintendo DS Lite

The Nintendo DS Lite (ニンテンドーDS Lite, Nintendō Dī Esu Raito) is a dual-screen handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It is the best-selling handheld video game console of all time and also the best-selling DS model of all time. It is a slimmer, brighter, and more lightweight redesign of the original Nintendo DS. It was announced on January 26, 2006, more than a month before its initial release in Japan on March 2, 2006 due to overwhelming demand for the original model. It has been released in Australia, North America, Europe, New Zealand, Singapore, and defined regions in South America, the Middle East, and East Asia. As of March 31, 2014, shipments of the DS Lite have reached 93.86 million units worldwide, according to Nintendo.

Launch and development

A larger model of the DS Lite was an unreleased alternative to the DS Lite. It was ready for mass production, but Nintendo decided against its release as sales of the DS Lite were still strong. Instead Nintendo prepared the DSi and released a "DSi XL" version of that console a year later.

Cobalt

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt in the Earth's crust is found only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.

Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.

Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining. The copper belt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Zambia yields most of the cobalt mined worldwide.

Nintendo DS

The Nintendo DS (ニンテンドーDS, Nintendō DS) is a dual-screen handheld game console developed and released by Nintendo. The device went on sale in North America on November 21, 2004. The DS, short for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld gaming: two LCD screens working in tandem (the bottom one featuring a touchscreen), a built-in microphone, and support for wireless connectivity. Both screens are encompassed within a clamshell design similar to the Game Boy Advance SP. The Nintendo DS also features the ability for multiple DS consoles to directly interact with each other over Wi-Fi within a short range without the need to connect to an existing wireless network. Alternatively, they could interact online using the now-closed Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. Its main competitor was Sony's PlayStation Portable as part of the seventh generation era.

Prior to its release, the Nintendo DS was marketed as an experimental, "third pillar" in Nintendo's console lineup, meant to complement the Game Boy Advance and GameCube. However, backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance titles and strong sales ultimately established it as the successor to the Game Boy series. On March 2, 2006, Nintendo launched the Nintendo DS Lite, a slimmer and lighter redesign of the original Nintendo DS with brighter screens. On November 1, 2008, Nintendo released the Nintendo DSi, another redesign with several hardware improvements and new features. All Nintendo DS models combined have sold 154.01 million units, making it the best selling handheld game console to date, and the second best selling video game console of all time. The Nintendo DS line was succeeded by the Nintendo 3DS line in 2011.

Need for Speed

Need for Speed, also known by its initials NFS, is a racing video game franchise published by Electronic Arts and developed by several studios including EA Black Box, Criterion Games and Ghost Games.

The series released its first title, The Need for Speed in 1994. The title comes from a famous quote from the 1986 film Top Gun. All installments of the series consist of racing cars on various tracks, with several titles including police pursuits in races. Since Need for Speed: High Stakes, the series has also integrated car body customization into gameplay.

Need for Speed is the most successful racing video game series in the world, and one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. Over 150 million copies of games in the series have been sold to date.

In June 2012, following Black Box's restructuring, British developer Criterion Games announced that it was in full control of the Need for Speed franchise. However, in August 2013, Swedish and British developers Ghost Games, Ghost Games UK and Criterion Games joined forces for the foreseeable future of the Need for Speed series. At the time, Ghost Games UK staff consisted of 80% of former Criterion Games employees.

List of Flash enemies

This is a list of fictional characters from the DC Comics universe who are or have been depicted as antagonists of the Flash.

Introduced in the Golden Age

The Golden Age Flash enemies were all villains of the first Flash, Jay Garrick, later portrayed as living on Earth-Two after the introduction of the Silver Age Flash.

Fiddler

The Fiddler (Isaac Bowin) first appeared in All-Flash #32 (December 1947/January 1948). He developed the ability to use his violin to play sounds that could either hypnotize others, shatter objects, or create barriers which he would use to perform crimes. The Fiddler's history was changed somewhat during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Pre-Crisis explored him as a man that started out as a thief who was arrested in India and sent to jail. While in prison, he met a fakir, charming a snake in his cell, who taught him the "mystic art" of Indian music. For the next five years, he learned the fakir's secret and made a crude violin made of materials he could scrounge in the prison. After the fakir declared his student had surpassed him, he used the instrument to hypnotize the guards to open their cells and he and the fakir escaped. He then murdered the fakir and the merchant who had him arrested in the first place. Post Crisis would reveal him as the son of British aristocrats, Isaac Bowin had a talent with music and an impulse to travel. Running out of money, he resorted to theft and robbery to make ends meet until he was arrested in India and sent to jail. He then met a fakir, much as in the pre-Crisis version.